No Eye Can See Read Online Free PDF

the brick walls, the damp smells, the cries in the night. He was free.
    He uncorked his canteen and drank from the warm water. He replaced the stopper, matching the black mark he'd made on it with the tiny dent in the lip. A perfect alignment. He liked things to be precise.
    He'd waited at Fort Laramie, not sure at first if he was ahead of her. Before he left the States, he'd asked their neighbors—the ones who would talk to him—where Ruth might be. They'd shook their heads, unknowing. Or covering for her. Then he'd ridden to the home of his brother-in-law, Jed, that fat lawyer who'd helped carry the charge against him. He didn't live there anymore.
    “Headed west,” a toothless woman told him when he inquired. “Left with his wife and four children and his maiden sister.” The sister would be her. Ruth. No maiden but Zane's wife.
    Zane had headed west, taken a steamship up the Missouri to St. Joe, every day expecting to catch up with them. He'd decided they must have taken a northern route. Everyone stopped at Laramie, though. North Platte travelers and those like him, on the south. Once at the fort, he'd read the register to see if Jed Barnard and his brood and his “maiden sister” had signed in. When he failed to find their names, he relaxed. He'd gotten ahead of them. He could now just wait.
    For a week, he spoke with his Southern charm to women and men looking tired and beaten, watched their eyes light up at the interest of a well-dressed stranger. He slipped in quick but pointed questions about who their traveling companions were as he nodded at their wearisome stories.
    But like a knife tossed for sport, his blade never drew blood, came out streaked only with dirt. He listened with false interest to tales of“trail justice,” people murdered by jealous husbands, or of women, all modesty lost, fawning after men not their husbands. Zane clucked his tongue as the storytellers expected him to. “Just no sense of honor anymore, anywhere, is there, ma'am?” he said. “What's the world coming to?”
    Then as they walked away, he found himself wanting to bathe, to wash off the grime from being with people, put cologne on strong enough to block out the smells of the righteous.
    Still, his time at Laramie fed him. One delicious morsel was a momentary conversation with a beautiful woman, blind and with child. Intriguing. She wore a shawl of independence heading west without a husband, yet carried vulnerability on her shoulders. If he'd had time, he might have pursued her, tamed her in his way. But the woman came first, his wife. And the next day he'd found he was on her trail.
    Going back once more over the registry at the fort, he looked not for her name or Jed's this time, but he read every entry. A wrangler named Matt Schmidtke wrote a sentence about having someone's cows in tow, telling Betha and all howdy and announcing to “Ruth Martin” that her horses were fine. He saw the date—two weeks before he'd gotten there. Somehow this Schmidtke had gone ahead, and Ruth could not have been much behind. Zane had made a choice then: to assume he'd somehow missed her, she'd somehow passed him by. He'd had no choice but to follow.
    Today, he knew for sure. The sign with his own name on it.
    No, she wouldn't go to Oregon, not and tell him so. She'd do the opposite. And he would find her. And when he did, he would play her like a harp, tease her into believing she was safe, then slowly orchestrate her cunning heart, drive her to increased frenzy until, like him, she'd have no place to run.
    He inhaled, his mouth open wide, his breathing raspy again. He must practice stillness, hold the rage he felt and bury it deep, fuel the only future he could imagine.
    He reined the horse south.
    He pictured Ruth, then, as he had a thousand times before. Sometimes, he dressed her slender frame in white, all ruffled and laced. He'd expose her shoulders and place a pearl choker at her throat to bring out the hazel of her eyes, the wet